The London Daily Telegraph’s Harwich correspondent gives further narratives of the Heligoland fight gleaned from British sailors. They say that many of the German shells which made hits did not burst, and to that fact they attribute the comparative lightness of the British casualty list.

“There were five shells in the boiler of the ——,” said one of them, mentioning the name of a destroyer. “If one of them had burst—well it would have been all up with the ship.”

“What did you do with them?” he was asked.

“Oh, we just shied them overboard. We’ve no room for such rubbish aboard our yacht.”

In another instance it is related that a shell fell on the deck of a British ship. There was no immediate explosion. The sailors rushed at it and pushed it into the sea.

One incident has been described which shows the grit of the German sailors.

“We were hard at it with a German cruiser,” he said, “and she was in a bad way, on the point of sinking. We could see her decks were in an awful mess and her stern was in flames. It had been shot away. We could see only one man on the forecastle, but he was a plucky one. He hoisted a flag, and it was still there when the ship went down. I suppose he went down with her.”